TL;DR taking properties off the tax roll costs the remaining taxpayers more. Pretty basic stuff. I've been talking this up to local electeds for decades, with very little progress. The only success I've had is ending the local program that makes "historic" properties tax exempt, but the huge whale exemptions for hospitals and whatnot remain.
Really seems to me that there should be no exemption for land tax for non profits or religious reasons. It is just far too subject to abuse, and it means that we have large churches in the middle of incredibly dense cities that pay almost nothing in taxes.
At least the early comments seem very focused on churches despite this article literally mentioning "religious" uses once and focusing nigh exclusively on hospitals.
Universities and hospitals are some of the worst offenders in situations like this, especially in urban cores, likely empowered by their clear transformation into state-sanctioned "non-profit" businesses that provide a good we are compelled to consume if we are a normie who wants a reasonable guarantee of a comfortable, healthy economic existence.
I'll not dispute the impact on expansion and consolidation, but I will say in recent months I have seen a number of hit pieces on the 340B program, mostly bankrolled by pharma companies (not this one just calling out the trend).
The exact implementation might be flawed, but if 340b is eliminated it will kill many hospitals in underserved communities.
So any plan to change 340B should really also explain how to fund these critical hospitals.
In the way that surgeries used to be the "money maker" to subsidize other expensive service lines like an ED, pharmacy has filled that gap in recent years.
It is less hospitals getting rich off overcharging insurance for drugs and more hospitals overcharging insurers for drugs since everything else they do is a drain on finances.
There's nothing funnier than a lot of people taking some absurd principles for granted when they make no sense at all, property taxes being one of them. So imagine you grind at least 30 years of your life working extra hours or two jobs to pay for an already inflated asset based on speculated prices rather than the actual cost, only to end up with that asset in a perpetual rent agreement where if you stopped paying it you basically don't own it anymore, a rent that also isn't controlled, so you can get screwed in the future like how a lot of people ended up selling their house because their retirement isn't enough to cover such rent.
Make it make sense, the only real winners here are the banks after they collect all that compound interest throughout all these years, and the government taking all these taxes.
Wouldn't any exception for any reason also fall into this argument?
Also the American healthcare system is such a kludge of laws with mixed motivations and so on. At this point keeping local hospitals operating seems like a good goal considering the pressure on many of them. Rural areas have had hospitals vanishing for a while now, the outcome there is not good.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 27.2 ms ] threadUniversities and hospitals are some of the worst offenders in situations like this, especially in urban cores, likely empowered by their clear transformation into state-sanctioned "non-profit" businesses that provide a good we are compelled to consume if we are a normie who wants a reasonable guarantee of a comfortable, healthy economic existence.
The exact implementation might be flawed, but if 340b is eliminated it will kill many hospitals in underserved communities.
So any plan to change 340B should really also explain how to fund these critical hospitals.
In the way that surgeries used to be the "money maker" to subsidize other expensive service lines like an ED, pharmacy has filled that gap in recent years.
It is less hospitals getting rich off overcharging insurance for drugs and more hospitals overcharging insurers for drugs since everything else they do is a drain on finances.
I've consulted with two large health systems that begin with A and they use 340B to subsidize all sorts of treatment.
Unfortunately American healthcare naturally seeks to socialize treatment, but instead of it being direct its in the most round about ways.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wzGqzWHDQA4m8DIo174yqx-eYDk...
Call it what it is, a perpetual rent.
There's nothing funnier than a lot of people taking some absurd principles for granted when they make no sense at all, property taxes being one of them. So imagine you grind at least 30 years of your life working extra hours or two jobs to pay for an already inflated asset based on speculated prices rather than the actual cost, only to end up with that asset in a perpetual rent agreement where if you stopped paying it you basically don't own it anymore, a rent that also isn't controlled, so you can get screwed in the future like how a lot of people ended up selling their house because their retirement isn't enough to cover such rent.
Make it make sense, the only real winners here are the banks after they collect all that compound interest throughout all these years, and the government taking all these taxes.
Also the American healthcare system is such a kludge of laws with mixed motivations and so on. At this point keeping local hospitals operating seems like a good goal considering the pressure on many of them. Rural areas have had hospitals vanishing for a while now, the outcome there is not good.